History of Washington, D.C.

Categories: Washington, D.C. history | History of the District of Columbia

The history of Washington, D.C. is tied intrinsically to its role as the constitutionally mandated capital of the United States.

Founding

The Piscataway Indians, a branch of the Algonquin, settled in the region in the early 17th century. European settlers began arriving in the decades thereafter, pushing the natives West as the Virginia Colony expanded from the south and the Province of Maryland from the east. The town of Georgetown, generally coterminous with the modern neighborhood of that name, was first settled in 1696, and continuously settled after 1751. The city of Alexandria, Virginia was established in 1749.

After the conclusion of the American Revolutionary War in 1783, the new federal government of the United States met in New York City and Philadelphia. Rivalry among the states to be home to the new capital led the 1787 Constitutional Convention to empower Congress in Article I, Section 8 of the new constitution

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States...

that is, to establish a new federal district governed by Congress which was not part of any state.

A Southern site for the capital was agreed at a sit-down dinner between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson agreed to support Hamilton's banking and federal bond plans in exchange for the choice of a Southern locale for the capital. It was initially 100 mi² (260 km²). The actual site of the District of Columbia on the Potomac River was chosen by President Washington. Washington may have chosen the site for its natural scenery, its location near the center of the new country, in the belief that the Potomac had the potential to be a great navigable waterway.

The signing of the Residence Bill on July 16, 1790 established a site along the Potomac River as the District of Columbia (seat of government) of the United States. Land for the district was given to the federal government by the states of Virginia and Maryland. The pre-existing towns of Georgetown and Alexandria were absorbed into the new District, with the remainder of the territory subdivided into Washington City and Washington County on the Maryland side of the Potomac (named after George Washington) and Alexandria County on the Virginia side. In 1871, Georgetown, Washington City and Washington County were unified into Washington, D.C.

Early years

Washington appointed Pierre Charles L'Enfant to devise a plan for the new city. L'Enfant designed the city's layout, a grid centered on the United States Capitol, crossed by diagonal avenues named after the states of the union. The intersections of these avenues with the north-south and east-west streets were carved into grand circles which would honor notable Americans. While surveying and construction were underway, both Congress and Presidents Washington and John Adams governed from other cities. In 1800, the seat of government was finally moved to the new city, and on February 27, 1801, the district was formally placed under the jurisdiction of Congress.

During the War of 1812, President James Madison and the fledgling U.S. government were forced to flee the District. The expedition was carried out between August 19 and August 29, 1814, and was well organized and vigorously executed. On the 24th, the American militia, which had collected at Bladensburg, Maryland, to protect the capital, retreated from the Capital City before it could be destroyed.

On August 24, 1814, British forces burnt the capital during the most notable destructive raid of the war. British forces burned the most important public buildings, including the Presidential Mansion, the U.S. Capitol, the Arsenal, the Navy Yard, the Treasury Building, the War Office, and the bridge across the Potomac.

Retrocession

Almost immediately after the "Federal City" was laid out across the Potomac River, the residents south of the Potomac began petitioning to be returned to Virginia's jurisdiction. By an act of Congress July 9, 1846, and with the approval of the Virginia General Assembly, the area south of the Potomac (39 mi² or about 100 km²) was returned, or "retroceded," to Virginia effective in 1847 and now is incorporated into Arlington County and a part of the City of Alexandria. A motivation for the retrocession for many in Congress may have been to preserve the active slave trade in Alexandria in the face of increasing abolitionist sentiment among Northern congressmen.

A large portion of the retroceded land near the river was an estate of George Washington Parke Custis.

See also article Alexandria County, D.C.

Civil War era

Washington remained a small city of a few thousand residents, virtually deserted during the torrid summertime, until the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War in 1861. President Abraham Lincoln created the Army of the Potomac to defend the federal capital, and thousands of soldiers came to the area. The significant expansion of the federal government to administer the war—and its legacies, such as veterans' pensions—led to notable growth in the city's population.

Slavery was abolished throughout the District in 1862.

On April 14, 1865, just days after the end of the war, Lincoln was shot in Ford's Theater by John Wilkes Booth during the play Our American Cousin. The next morning, at 7:22 AM, President Lincoln died in the house across the street, the first American president to be assassinated. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton said, "Now he belongs to the ages."

Post-Civil War era

In the early 1870s, Washington was given a territorial government. Its first governor, Alexander Shepherd, however, gained an unfortunate reputation as an extravagant boss. His excesses led Congress to abolish his office in favor of direct rule; Congressional governance of the District would continue for a century.

The Washington Monument, after four decades of construction, finally opened in 1888. Plans were laid to further develop the monumental aspects of the city, with work contributed by such noted figures as Frederick Law Olmsted and Daniel Burnham. However, development of the Lincoln Memorial and other structures on the National Mall did not get underway until the early 20th century.

20th century

President Herbert Hoover ordered the United States Army on July 28, 1932 to forcibly evict the "Bonus Army" of World War I veterans that gathered in Washington, D.C. to secure promised veterans' benefits early. U.S. troops dispersed the last of the "Bonus Army" the next day.

A shooting at the U.S. Capitol occurred in 1954 when four Puerto Rican nationalists fired into the floor of the House of Representatives. Five representatives were wounded; one severely.

Until the 1950s, District of Columbia public schools had always been racially segregated. When the city's Board of Education began building the John Phillip Sousa Junior High, a group of parents from the Anacostia neighborhood petitioned to have the school admit both black and white students, but when it was constructed the Board declared that only whites would be allowed there. The parents sued in a case that was decided in the landmark Supreme Court case Bolling v. Sharpe. Partly due to the District's unique status under the Constitution, the court decided unanimously that all of D.C.'s public schools had to be integrated. In the wake of this and the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, the Eisenhower administration decided make D.C. schools the first to integrate as an example to the rest of the nation.

The Twenty-third Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified on March 29, 1961 allowing residents of Washington, D.C. to vote for president and have their votes count in the Electoral College the same as the least populous state, which currently has three electoral votes.

On August 28, 1963, Washington took centerstage in the American Civil Rights Movement, with the March on Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famed I Have A Dream speech at the Lincoln Memorial. Following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968, Washington was devastated by the riots that broke out in the U Street neighborhood and spread to other neighborhoods, including Columbia Heights. The civil unrest drove not only whites, but middle-class blacks out of the city core, and caused many businesses to leave the downtown and inner city areas. Marks of riots scarred some neighborhoods into the late 1990s.

In 1973, Congress passed the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, ceding some of its power over the city to a new, locally elected city council and a popularly elected mayor. Voters chose Walter Washington to become the first elected mayor of Washington, D.C. and the first black mayor of a major American city.

The first 4.6 miles (7.4 kilometers) of the Washington Metro subway system opened on March 27, 1976, following years of acrimonious battles with Congress over funding and highway construction.

In 1978, Congress sent the District of Columbia Voting Rights Amendment to the states for ratification. This amendment would have granted the District representation in the House, Senate, and Electoral College as if it were a state. (The 23rd Amendment granted the District representation in the Electoral College, but restricted the number of electors it was allowed to have.) The proposed amendment had a seven-year limit for ratification, and only sixteen states ratified it before the time limit ran out.

On January 13, 1982, Air Florida Flight 90 crashed into the 14th Street Bridge shortly after takeoff from Washington National Airport in nearby Arlington, Virginia, killing 78 and destroying a portion of the bridge. The rebuilt portion was named the Arland D. Williams Jr. Memorial Bridge in honor of a heroic victim of the disaster.

Marion Barry became the city's second elected mayor after defeating Walter Washington in the 1978 Democratic Party primary. During his third term, Barry was arrested for drug use in an FBI sting on January 18, 1990. He was acquitted of felony charges, but convicted on one misdemeanor count of cocaine possession for which he served a six-month jail term. On January 2, 1991 Sharon Pratt Kelly (elected as Sharon Pratt Dixon but married later that year) was sworn in as mayor, becoming the first black woman to lead a city of that size and importance in the United States.

Marion Barry defeated her in the 1994 primary and was once again elected mayor for his fourth term, during which the city nearly became insolvent and was forced to give up some home rule to a Congressionally appointed financial control board. The current mayor, Anthony Williams, a Yale University-educated lawyer, served as chief financial officer on the control board. He was elected mayor in 1998 and despite a technicality which left him off the official ballot, won reelection in 2002 as a write-in candidate.

See also: List of mayors of Washington, D.C.

21st century

The Washington area was the target of at least one of the four hijacked planes in the September 11, 2001 attacks. One plane struck the Pentagon in Arlington County, killing 125 people in addition to the 64 aboard the plane, while another that was downed in a field in Pennsylvania is believed by many to have been intended to hit either the White House or the U.S. Capitol.

Shortly after September 11, Washington was once more subject to fear from an anthrax attack, when what may have been a domestic terrorist sent anthrax-contaminated mail to numerous members of Congress. Thirty-one staff members were infected, and two U.S. Postal Service employees at a contaminated mail sorting facility in Brentwood, later died of pulmonary anthrax.

During three weeks of October 2002, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo killed ten people and wounded three others in the Washington region with a high-powered rifle in what became known as the Beltway Sniper attacks. The apparently random selection of victims (crossing racial, gender, and socioeconomic categories) caused a general panic in the Washington area and led schools to cancel all outdoor activities. Muhammad and Malvo were arrested on October 24 at a highway rest stop. In March 2004, Muhammad was sentenced to death and Malvo to life imprisonment for the attacks.

On March 8, 2003, the first of more than 40 arson fires was set in a 26-month-long series of fires set in the District and the inner Maryland suburbs by a serial arsonist. One person, an 86-year-old woman named Lou Edna Jones, was killed in the fires, which were mostly set at night. The crimes remained unsolved until, thanks to DNA evidence, D.C. resident and KFC manager Thomas Sweatt, 50, was arrested for setting the fires on April 27, 2005. He was sentenced to life in prison on September 12, 2005.

In November 2003, the toxin ricin was found in the mailroom of the White House, and in February 2004, in the mailroom of U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. As with the earlier anthrax attacks, no arrests have been made.

Partly in response to the 9/11, anthrax, and ricin events since 2001, the Washington area has taken many steps to increase security.

Screening devices for biological agents, metal detectors, and vehicle barriers are now much more commonplace at office buildings as well as government buildings. After the 2004 Madrid train bombings, local authorities have decided to test explosives detectors on the vulnerable Washington Metro subway system. False alarms due to suspicious chemical or powder substances or suspected explosives have led to fairly frequent evacuations of buildings, Metro stations, and local post offices.

When US forces in Pakistan raided a house suspected of being a terrorist hideout, they found information several years old, about attacks on Washington, D.C., New York City, and Newark, New Jersey. It was directed to intelligence officials, and on August 1, 2004, the Secretary of Homeland Security put the city on Orange (High) Alert.

A few days later security checkpoints were popping up in and around the Capitol Hill and Foggy Bottom neighborhoods, and fences were erected on monuments once freely accessible, such as the Capitol. Tours to the White House can only be arranged by a member of Congress. Screening devices for biological agents, metal detectors, and vehicle barriers became much more commonplace at office buildings as well as government buildings and in transportation facilities. This ultra-tight security was referred to as "Fortress Washington"—people protested that "Walling off Washington" due to information several years old was not acceptable. The vehicle inspections set up around the Capitol were removed in November 2004.

On September 29, 2004, Major League Baseball announced plans to relocate the Montreal Expos to Washington for the 2005 season; on November 22, a new name was announced for the team — the Washington Nationals. A very public back-and-forth between the city council and MLB threatened to scuttle the agreement until December 21, when a plan for a new stadium in Southeast D.C. was finalized. The Nationals will play at R.F.K. Stadium for the 2005, 2006, and 2007 seasons, with the new stadium slated to be ready for 2008. The market is also home to many fans of the Baltimore Orioles whose owner, Peter Angelos, opposed the move of the Expos to D.C.

Due in large part to its predominantly African-American population, Washington is a solidly Democratic city. Washington's current delegate to Congress, Eleanor Holmes Norton, is a Democrat, and much of the city council as well as Mayor Williams are Democrats. Since gaining three electoral votes in 1961, D.C. has never supported a Republican presidential candidate and its margins for Democrats are not only the largest of any state, but are also the largest of any single county equivalent. In 2004, John Kerry won the District's 3 electoral votes by a margin of 80 percentage points with 89.2% of the total vote.

External links

District representation debate

• D.C. Vote An organization working for District representation in Congress
• Committee for the Capital City An organization supporting retrocession of D.C. to Maryland
• "Treat Washington, D.C. as Part of Maryland for Congressional Elections" argues for this particular approach for D.C. representation in Congress.